Book
Essays on Ego Psychology: Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory
This collection of Heinz Hartmann's papers was published in New York by International Universities Press in 1964 (xv + 492 pages). Its twenty chapters span more than three decades, from early clinical and experimental studies of his Vienna years to the theoretical papers of the 1950s in which he developed psychoanalytic ego psychology after Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. Among them are "Psychoanalysis and the Concept of Health" and "Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego", in which he distinguished the ego as a psychic system from the self. Others are "The Mutual Influences in the Development of Ego and Id", "Notes on the Theory of Sublimation", in which he worked out the concept of neutralization, and "Notes on the Reality Principle". Further papers deal with the theory of the drives, rational and irrational action, psychoanalysis and sociology, the application of psychoanalytic concepts to social science, developmental psychology, the technical implications of ego psychology, schizophrenia, infantile neurosis, the development of the ego concept in Freud's work, and psychoanalysis as a scientific theory. The papers of the 1950s gathered here set out his distinction between primary and secondary ego autonomy. The volume also reprints studies on parapraxes in Korsakoff's psychosis, on remembering completed and uncompleted tasks in obsessional neurosis, and on twins. A German edition appeared as Ich-Psychologie: Studien zur psychoanalytischen Theorie.
Main ideas
- The collection gathers Hartmann's papers from his early clinical and experimental work in Vienna to his main theoretical statements of ego psychology after 1939.
- The ego is defined as a psychic system set apart from the self, and narcissism as the libidinal investment of the self.
- Ego functions have primary autonomy when they rest on inborn apparatuses. They have secondary autonomy when patterns born in conflict become stable structures through a change of function.
- Sublimation is recast as the neutralization of libidinal and aggressive energy for the use of the ego.
- Ego psychology is applied to the concept of health, developmental psychology, technique, schizophrenia and the social sciences.
- Hartmann traces the development of the ego concept in Freud's work and considers psychoanalysis as a scientific theory.
What it shows
- 1939
Heinz Hartmann developed Ego psychology
In "Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem" Hartmann called for widening Freud's ego psychology to the ego functions that cannot be derived from the drives, and his later papers, collected in "Essays on Ego Psychology" (1964), built this into a general theory of the ego.
- 1939
Heinz Hartmann introduced Ego autonomy
Hartmann named an area of "autonomous ego development" in 1939 and set out the distinction between primary and secondary autonomy in his papers of the 1950s, collected in "Essays on Ego Psychology".
- 1939
Ego autonomy derives from Conflict-free ego sphere
Hartmann's idea of autonomous ego development grew out of his conflict-free ego sphere: both describe ego functions that cannot be derived from the drives or from conflict.